An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Nearly half of children in the United States are breathing dangerous levels of air pollution, according to a new report, as experts warned Donald Trump's expansive rollback of protections will make the situation worse. The 27th annual air quality report from the American Lung Association (ALA) released on Wednesday evaluates pollution across the country by grading levels of ground-level ozone -- also known as smog -- as well as year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution, commonly referred to as soot. The report analyzed quality-assured data collected between 2022 and 2024. It found that 33.5 million children in the US -- 46% of those under 18 -- live in areas that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. The report also found that 7 million children, or 10% of all children in the US, live in communities that failed all three measures.

The report further found that communities of color are disproportionately exposed to unhealthy air. As a result, they are more likely to live with one or more chronic health conditions that make them more vulnerable to pollution, including asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. Although people of color make up 42.1% of the US population, they represent 54.2% of those living in counties with at least one failing grade, the report noted. It also found that a person of color is 2.42 times more likely than a white person to live in a community that fails all three pollution measures. Smog remains the most widespread pollutant affecting Americans' health. Between 2022 and 2024, 38% of the US population -- approximately 129.1 million people -- were exposed to ozone levels that put their health at risk. This marks the highest number recorded in the ALA's report in six years, and a 3.9 million increase from the previous year.

Several factors contributed to these unhealthy pollution levels, including extreme heat, drought and wildfires which have exposed a growing share of the population to harmful ozone, the report said. The regions most affected by high ozone levels include south-western states from California to Texas, as well as much of the midwest. This is mainly driven by smoke from Canada's 2023 wildfires crossing into the US, along with high temperatures and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in 2023 and 2024 -- particularly in southern states. More broadly, the report found that climate change is intensifying ozone pollution by boosting precursor emissions and creating atmospheric conditions such as higher temperatures and lower wind speeds that allow pollutants to build up and ozone to form. Another growing source of pollution: datacenters. The report notes how they rely on regional electricity grids where fossil fuels like methane gas and coal still account for a large portion of generation. Many datacenters also use dozens of large diesel-powered backup generators, which emit carcinogenic particulate matter.

"Children's lungs are still developing," said Will Barrett, assistant vice-president of the ALA's Nationwide Clean Air Policy. "For their body size, they're breathing more air. And also, kids play outdoors, they're more active, they're breathing in more outdoor air [...]. So, air pollution exposure in children can contribute to long-term developmental harm to their lungs, new cases of asthma, increased risks of respiratory illness and other health considerations later in life."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Google announced on Tuesday that it will invest $15 billion in India over the next five years to establish its first artificial intelligence hub in the country. Located in the southern city of Visakhapatnam, the hub will be one of Google's largest globally. It will feature gigawatt-scale data center operations, extensive energy infrastructure and an expanded fiber-optic network, the company said in a statement. The investment underscores Google's growing reliance on India as a key technology and talent base in the global race for AI dominance.

For India, it brings in high-value infrastructure and foreign investment at a scale that can accelerate its digital transformation ambitions. Google said its AI hub investment will include construction of a new international subsea gateway that would connect to the company's more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) of existing terrestrial and subsea cables. "The initiative creates substantial economic and societal opportunities for both India and the United States, while pioneering a generational shift in AI capability," the company's statement said.

The world's highest bridge opened in China on Sunday, taking the crown from another bridge in the same province. From a report: The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge soars about 2,050 feet above a river and gorge in the southern Chinese province of Guizhou. It is more than twice as high as the Royal Gorge Bridge, which is suspended 956 feet above the Arkansas River in Colorado and is the highest in the United States.

According to Chinese state media, the new Guizhou bridge also sets a record as the world's longest bridge in a mountainous region, spanning 4,600 feet across. Hailed as China's latest "infrastructure miracle," the bridge is designed to spur tourism and economic growth in one of the country's least developed regions.

Governments worldwide are implementing heat protection laws as 2.4 billion workers face extreme temperature exposure and 19,000 die annually from heat-related workplace injuries, according to a World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization report.

Japan imposed $3,400 fines for employers failing to provide cooling measures when wet-bulb temperatures reach 28C. Singapore mandated hourly temperature sensors at large outdoor sites and requires 15-minute breaks every hour at 33C wet-bulb readings. Southern European nations ordered afternoon work stoppages this summer when temperatures exceeded 115F across Greece, Italy and Spain.

The United States lacks federal heat standards; only California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have state-level protections. Boston passed requirements for heat illness prevention plans on city projects. Enforcement remains inconsistent -- Singapore inspectors found nearly one-third of 70 sites violated the 2023 law. Texas and Florida prohibit local governments from mandating rest and water breaks.

China "is pouring money into building an AI supply chain with as little reliance on the U.S. as possible," the Wall Street Journal noted this weekend.

But what does that look like? The New York Times visits Liangzhu, "the coder 'village' at the heart of China's AI frenzy... a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou... As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China's AI frenzy," with its proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek..." In Liangzhu, many engineers said they were killing time until they could create their own startups, waiting out noncompete agreements they had signed at bigger companies like ByteDance... But some said the government support for Hangzhou's tech scene had scared off some investors. Several company founders, who asked not to be named so they could discuss sensitive topics, said it was difficult for them to attract funds from foreign venture capital firms, frustrating their ambitions to grow outside China. The nightmare situation, they said, would be to end up like ByteDance, the Chinese parent of TikTok, whose executives have been questioned before Congress about the company's ties to the Chinese government. Founders described choosing between two paths for their companies' growth: Take government funding and tailor their product to the Chinese market, or raise enough money on their own to set up offices in a country like Singapore to pitch foreign investors. For most, the first was the only feasible option.

Another uncertainty is access to the advanced computer chips that power artificial intelligence systems. Washington has spent years trying to prevent Chinese companies from buying these chips, and Chinese companies like Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. are racing to produce their own. So far, the Chinese-made chips work well enough to help companies like ByteDance provide some of their AI services in China. Many Chinese companies have created stockpiles of Nvidia chips despite Washington's controls. But it is not clear how long that supply will last, or how quickly China's chipmakers can catch up to their American counterparts...

Liangzhu villagers have been hosting film nights. They had recently gathered to watch "The Matrix." Afterward, they decided the movie should be required viewing, Lin said. Its theme — people finding their way out of a vast system controlling society — provided spot-on inspiration. Aspiring founders in Liangzhu, even those who did not go to top universities, believe they could start the next world-changing tech company, said Felix Tao [a 36-year-old former Facebook and Alibaba employee.] "Many of them are super brave to make a choice to explore their own way, because in China that is not the common way to live your life."

"In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north..." remembers the BBC. [T]he Soviet Union simultaneously fired three nuclear devices buried 127m (417ft) underground. The yield of each device was 15 kilotonnes (about the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945). The experiment, codenamed "Taiga", was part of a two-decade long Soviet programme of carrying out peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs).

In this case, the blasts were supposed to help excavate a massive canal to connect the basin of the Pechora River with that of the Kama, a tributary of the Volga. Such a link would have allowed Soviet scientists to siphon off some of the water destined for the Pechora, and send it southward through the Volga. It would have diverted a significant flow of water destined for the Arctic Ocean to go instead to the hot, heavily populated regions of Central Asia and southern Russia. This was just one of a planned series of gargantuan "river reversals" that were designed to alter the direction of Russia's great Eurasian waterways...

Years later, Leonid Volkov, a scientist involved in preparing the Taiga explosions, recalled the moment of detonation. "The final countdown began: ...3, 2, 1, 0... then fountains of soil and water shot upward," he wrote. "It was an impressive sight." Despite Soviet efforts to minimise the fallout by using a low-fission explosive, which produce fewer atomic fragments, the blasts were detected as far away as the United States and Sweden, whose governments lodged formal complaints, accusing Moscow of violating the Limited Test Ban Treaty...

Ultimately, the nuclear explosions that created Nuclear Lake, one of the few physical traces left of river reversal, were deemed a failure because the crater was not big enough. Although similar PNE canal excavation tests were planned, they were never carried out. In 2024, the leader of a scientific expedition to the lake announced radiation levels were normal.
"Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which not only consumed a huge amount of money, but pushed environmental concerns up the political agenda," the article notes.

"Four months after the Number Four Reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev cancelled the river reversal project."

And a Russian blogger who travelled to Nuclear Lake in the summer of 2024 told the BBC that nearly 50 years later, there were some places where the radiation was still significantly elevated.

"Thousands of buildings across the United States are staying cool with the help of cutting-edge batteries made from one of the world's simplest materials," reports the Washington Post — ice. When electricity is cheap, the batteries freeze water. When energy costs go up, building managers turn off their pricey chillers and use the ice to keep things cool. A typical building uses about a fifth of its electricity for cooling, according to the International Energy Agency. By shifting their energy use to cheaper times of day, the biggest buildings can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their power bills. They can also avoid using electricity from the dirtiest fossil fuel plants. In places where the weather is hot and energy prices swing widely throughout the day — for instance, Texas, Southern California and most of the American Southwest — buildings could cut their power bills and carbon emissions by as much as a third, experts say...

When every building is blasting its air conditioner at the same moment on a hot day, power companies often fire up backup generators, known as peaker plants, which are generally extra pricey and polluting. If utilities avoid using peaker plants, they'll pollute less and save money. Last year, the Energy Department struck a tentative $306 million loan deal with the ice-battery-maker Nostromo Energy to install its systems in 193 California buildings to make energy cheaper and cleaner while lowering the state's blackout risk.
"The batteries themselves are huge..." the article acknowledges, citing one in New York City that uses 100 parking spot-sized tanks "which collectively make 3 million margaritas' worth of ice each night... But that's starting to change." (And they believe new smaller designs "could bring the batteries into smaller buildings and even houses.") Wherever they can squeeze into the market, ice batteries could be a cheaper and longer-lasting option than the lithium-ion batteries that power phones, cars and some buildings because their main ingredient is water, experts say. The pricey chemicals in a lithium-ion cell might degrade after 10 years, but water never wears out.
And according to the article, one company has already installed ice batteries in over 4,000 buildings...

The Washington Post visits one of over 100 tide-tracking stations around the U.S. -- Georgia's Fort Pulaski tide gauge: Since 2010, the sea level at the Fort Pulaski gauge has risen by more than 7 inches, one of the fastest rates in the country, according to a Washington Post analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data for 127 tide gauges. Similar spikes are affecting the entire U.S. Southeast -- showing a glimpse of our climate future... [I]n the previous 30 years, the ocean rose about 3.7 inches. And the deluge stretches all across the South and the Gulf Coast; over the past 14 years, sea levels in the U.S. South have risen twice as fast as the global average...

Scientists suspect part of that is because of the Gulf Stream -- a long band of warm water that follows the coast up from the equator and then, near Cape Hatteras, turns out into the Atlantic Ocean. The waters of the Gulf Stream and the Gulf of Mexico are warming faster than other parts of the Atlantic, boosting sea levels. "The Gulf of Mexico has warmed exceptionally fast over the past decade and a half," Piecuch said. "It's uncontroversial." But scientists have puzzled over where all that heat is coming from... [T]he current heat could be part of long-term variations in ocean currents, and not a clear signal of climate change. But the fact that the change is linked to heat -- at the same time as the entire ocean is taking on excess heat from global warming -- makes some experts suspicious. "This particular mechanism does not immediately suggest it's just natural variability," [said Ben Hamlington, a research scientist who leads NASA's sea level change team].

For now, sea levels in the Southeast are surging -- and they provide an early picture of what most of the United States, and the rest of the world, will experience as oceans rise... On Tybee Island -- whose population of 4,000 swells to over 100,000 during the summer months -- leaders have gotten used to the constant fight against the waves. Five or six times a year, high tides sweep over the one road that connects the island to the mainland, cutting residents off from services. By 2050, scientists estimate, those high tides will happen 70 days a year. With the help of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the city has built dunes to protect vacation homes and local storefronts from the rising water; many homeowners have also raised their properties high up into the air. In Savannah, small businesses and city streets are washed in floods even on bright, sunny days -- thanks to high tides that surge into the drainage system. The city estimates that it will cost $400 million to update the stormwater infrastructure over the next two decades. So far, it has raised $150 million...

Other states and cities will soon see the same effects. NASA projections show that in the coming decades, many cities in the Northeast will experience up to 100 more days of high-tide flooding each year.
"Some researchers think that the Southeast acceleration may be linked to long-term weather patterns in the Atlantic Ocean like the North Atlantic Oscillation.

"If so, the trend could switch in the coming decades -- with areas of the Northeast seeing rapid sea level rise while the trend in the Southeast slows down."

The CDC has confirmed the first case of severe bird flu in the United States. NPR reports: Louisiana health officials initially reported the infection last week, saying a person was hospitalized after being exposed to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shared their findings that indicate the H5N1 virus responsible for the illness belongs to a genetic lineage that's circulating in wild birds and poultry -- different from what's spreading in dairy cattle and driving the majority of infections in agricultural workers.

In the U.S., more than 60 people have been infected so far, although some research suggests the official tally may be an undercount. The illnesses linked to dairy cattle have largely led to mild illnesses in humans.

The version of the virus in the Louisiana case is the so-called "D1.1 genotype." It has previously popped up in poultry workers in Washington state, who developed mild symptoms after testing positive in October. More recently, however, a teenager in British Columbia was hospitalized after contracting this D1.1 strain of the virus. Canadian health officials were unable to figure out how that person was infected. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis with the CDC, told reporters on Wednesday that bird blu has a well-established history of leading to severe illness and death. He added: "Infections without a clear source of exposure do occur, neither these cases nor the cases with known animal or animal products exposure have resulted in human to human transmission." California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency as the H5N1 bird flu virus moves from the Central valley to Southern California herds. The declaration will allow for a more streamlined approach among state and local agencies to tackle the virus, providing "flexibility around staffing, contracting, and other rules to support California's evolving response,'" reports the Los Angeles Times, citing a statement from Newsom's office.

"Building on California's testing and monitoring system -- the largest in the nation -- we are committed to further protecting public health, supporting our agriculture industry, and ensuring that Californians have access to accurate, up-to-date information," said Newsom in a statement. "While the risk to the public remains low, we will continue to take all necessary steps to prevent the spread of this virus."

Further reading:
US Government Orders Nationwide Testing of Milk for Bird Flu to Stop the Virus's Spread
Bird Flu Fears Stoke the Race for an mRNA Flu Vaccine

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple will begin making AirPods in India for the first time early next year, reports Bloomberg. Foxconn will make the wireless earphones at a factory near Hyderabad in Telangana state, beginning around Q1 2025. The factory has reportedly been making AirPods on a trial basis, with manufacturing set to ramp up quickly after production begins. It will make AirPods only the second major Apple product to be assembled in India after the iPhone.

The decision to set up production in India was requested by Apple back in 2023, according to a previous report. Foxconn officials apparently debated internally for months about whether to assemble AirPods due to the relatively low profit margins, but ultimately decided to go ahead with it to "reinforce engagement" with Apple. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government offers financial incentives to companies that produce wireless earphones and smartwatches locally, which influenced Apple's decision to move manufacturing there. The move is also part of Apple's plan to reduce its production reliance on China amid rising geopolitical tensions between the country and the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Flock is one of the largest vendors of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the country. The company markets itself as having the goal to fully "eliminate crime" with the use of ALPRs and other connected surveillance cameras, a target experts say is impossible. [...] Flock and automated license plate reader cameras owned by other companies are now in thousands of neighborhoods around the country. Many of these systems talk to each other and plug into other surveillance systems, making it possible to track people all over the country.

"It went from me seeing 10 license plate readers to probably seeing 50 or 60 in a few days of driving around," [said Alabama resident and developer Will Freeman]. "I wanted to make a record of these things. I thought, 'Can I make a database of these license plate readers?'" And so he made a map, and called it DeFlock. DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock (PDF) to the posts holding up Huntsville's ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world. [...]

When I first talked to Freeman, DeFlock had a few dozen cameras mapped in Huntsville and a handful mapped in Southern California and in the Seattle suburbs. A week later, as I write this, DeFlock has crowdsourced the locations of thousands of cameras in dozens of cities across the United States and the world. He said so far more than 1,700 cameras have been reported in the United States and more than 5,600 have been reported around the world. He has also begun scraping parts of Flock's website to give people a better idea of where to look to map them. For example, Flock says that Colton, California, a city with just over 50,000 people outside of San Bernardino, has 677 cameras.

People who submit cameras to DeFlock have the ability to note the direction that they are pointing in, which can help people understand how these cameras are being positioned and the strategies that companies and police departments are using when deploying them. For example, all of the cameras in downtown Huntsville are pointing away from the downtown core, meaning they are primarily focused on detecting cars that are entering downtown Huntsville from other areas.

Zambia has the largest man-made lake in the world, reports the Associated Press — but a severe drought has left the lake's 128-meter-high (420-feet) dam wall "almost completely exposed". This leaves Kariba dam without enough water to run most of its hydroelectric turbines — meaning millions of people in Zambia now face "a climate-induced energy crisis..." The water level is so low that only one of the six turbines on Zambia's side of the dam is able to operate, cutting generation to less than 10% of normal output. Zambia relies on the dam for more than 80% of its national electricity supply, and the result is Zambians have barely a few hours of power a day at the best of times. Often, areas are going without electricity for days... The power crisis is a bigger blow to the economy and the battle against poverty than the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Zambia Association of Manufacturers president Ashu Sagar.

Africa contributes the least to global warming but is the most vulnerable continent to extreme weather events and climate change as poor countries can't meet the high financials costs of adapting. This year's drought in southern Africa is the worst in decades and has parched crops and left millions hungry, causing Zambia and others to already declare national disasters and ask for aid...

Zambia is not alone in that hydroelectric power makes up over 80% of the energy mix in Mozambique, Malawi, Uganda, Ethiopia and Congo, even as experts warn it will become more unreliable. "Extreme weather patterns, including prolonged droughts, make it clear that overreliance on hydro is no longer sustainable," said Carlos Lopes, a professor at the Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
While the lake's water level normally rises six meters after it rains, "It moved by less than 30 centimeters after the last rainy season barely materialized, authorities said...

"Experts say there's also no guarantee those rains will come and it's dangerous to rely on a changing climate given Zambia has had drought-induced power problems before, and the trend is they are getting worse."

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried's legal team has filed an appeal challenging his conviction on seven felony counts and his 25-year prison sentence. They argue that he was not presumed innocent, that the jury received incomplete information about FTX user funds, and that the prosecution's narrative was biased. CoinTelegraph reports: In a Sept. 13 filing in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, SBF's lawyers filed a 102-page brief claiming that the former FTX CEO was "never presumed innocent," subject to scrutiny that allegedly affected prosecutors, the presiding judge, and treatment by the media. Bankman-Fried's legal team announced in April -- a few weeks after a federal judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison -- that they intended to appeal. According to the appeal, SBF's lawyers alleged the jury was "only allowed to see half the picture" with FTX user funds, claiming prosecutors had "presented a false narrative" that the money was permanently lost and Bankman-Fried intentionally caused that loss. They also claimed that counsel for the FTX debtors worked with the US government in a way that was above and beyond "cooperation," providing information allegedly as an "arm of the prosecution."

"From day one, the prevailing narrative -- initially spun by the lawyers who took over FTX, quickly adopted by their contacts at the US Attorney's Office -- was that Bankman-Fried had stolen billions of dollars of customer funds, driven FTX to insolvency, and caused billions in losses," said the appeal. "Now, nearly two years later, a very different picture is emerging -- one confirming FTX was never insolvent, and in fact had assets worth billions to repay its customers. But the jury at Bankman-Fried's trial never got to see that picture." The legal team requested the appellate court grant SBF a new trial with a different judge. It's unclear whether the Second Circuit could rule to affirm Bankman-Fried's conviction in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York or reverse the decision and set the groundwork for a new trial.

For more than 30 years, the world's largest iceberg was stuck in the Antarctic. Five times the size of New York City's land area and more than 1,000 feet deep, the mammoth piece of ice finally became loose in 2020 and began a slow drift toward the Southern Ocean. Now, A23a, as it's known, is spinning in place. From a report: After leaving Antarctic waters, the iceberg got stuck in a vortex over a seamount, or an underwater mountain. Imagine a 1,400-square-mile piece of ice as deep as the Empire State Building spinning slowly but steadily enough to fully rotate it on its head over the course of about 24 days. The iceberg is spinning near the South Orkney Islands, about 375 miles northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula, "maintaining a chill 15 degree rotation per day," the British Antarctic Survey, the United Kingdom's polar research institute, said on social media.

"It's basically just sitting there, spinning around and it will very slowly melt as long as it stays there," said Alex Brearley, a physical oceanographer and head of the Open Oceans research group at the British Antarctic Survey. "What we don't know is how quickly it will actually come out of this." A23a has been embroiled in drama since the start, a trait it picked up from its parent-berg. A23, which was even bigger than A23a, was one of three icebergs that broke off, or calved, from the Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986. At the time of the calving, A23 was home to a Soviet Union research center and researchers eventually had to abandon the base. A23a broke off later that year and hit bottom in the Weddell Sea, where it would remain for 34 more years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: On February 1st last year, Montana residents gawked upwards at a large white object hovering in the sky that looked to be another moon. The airborne object was in fact a Chinese spy balloon loaded with cameras, sensors, and other high-tech surveillance equipment, and it set off a nationwide panic as it drifted across the midwestern and southern United States. How much information the balloon gathered -- if any -- remains unknown, but the threat was deemed serious enough that an F-22 U.S. Air Force jet fired a Sidewinder missile at the unmanned balloon on a February afternoon, blasting it to pieces a few miles off the coast of South Carolina. At the same time that the eyes of Americans were fixed on the Chinese intruder in the sky, around 30 cars owned by Chinese companies and equipped with cameras and geospatial mapping technology were navigating the streets of greater Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose. They collected detailed videos, audio recordings, and location data on their surroundings to chart out California's roads and develop their autonomous driving algorithms.

Since 2017, self-driving cars owned by Chinese companies have traversed 1.8 million miles of California alone, according to a Fortune analysis of the state's Department of Motor Vehicles data. As part of their basic functionality, these cars capture video of their surroundings and map the state's roads to within two centimeters of precision. Companies transfer that information from the cars to data centers, where they use it to train their self-driving systems. The cars are part of a state program that allows companies developing self-driving technology -- including Google-spinoff Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox -- to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. Among the 35 companies approved to test by the California DMV, seven are wholly or partly China-based. Five of them drove on California roads last year: WeRide, Apollo, AutoX, Pony.ai, and DiDi Research America. Some Chinese companies are approved to test in Arizona and Texas as well.

Fitted with cameras, microphones, and sophisticated sensors, self-driving cars have long raised flags among privacy advocates. Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, called self-driving cars "rolling surveillance devices" that passively collect massive amounts of information on Americans in plain sight. In the context of national security however, the data-hungry Chinese cars have received surprisingly little scrutiny. Some experts have compared them to Chinese-owned social media site TikTok, which has been subjected to a forced divestiture or ban on U.S. soil due to fears around its data collection practices threatening national security. The years-long condemnation of TikTok at the highest levels of the U.S. government has heightened the sense of distrust between the U.S. and China.

Some Chinese self-driving car companies appear to store U.S. data in China, according to privacy policies reviewed byFortune -- a situation that experts said effectively leaves the data accessible to the Chinese government. Depending on the type of information collected by the cars, the level of precision, and the frequency at which it's collected, the data could provide a foreign adversary with a treasure trove of intelligence that could be used for everything from mass surveillance to war planning, according to security experts who spoke withFortune. And yet, despite the sensitivity of the data, officials at the state and federal agencies overseeing the self-driving car testing acknowledge that they do not currently monitor, or have any process for checking, exactly what data the Chinese vehicles are collecting and what happens to the data after it is collected. Nor do they have any additional rules or policies in place for oversight of Chinese self-driving cars versus the cars in the program operated by American or European companies. "It is literally the wild, Wild West here," said Craig Singleton, director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative-leaning national security think tank. "There's no one in charge."

"Images captured from space show the growth of Cuba's electronic eavesdropping stations," reported the Wall Street Journal this week, citing a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

But they added that the stations "are believed to be linked to China," including previously-unreported construction about 70 miles from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. (The Journal had previously reported China and Cuba were "negotiating closer defense and intelligence ties, including establishing a new joint military training facility on the island and an eavesdropping facility.") At the time, the Journal reported that Cuba and China were already jointly operating eavesdropping stations on the island, according to U.S. officials, who didn't disclose their locations. It couldn't be determined which, if any, of those are included in the sites covered by the CSIS report.

The concern about the stations, former officials and analysts say, is that China is using Cuba's geographical proximity to the southeastern U.S. to scoop up sensitive electronic communications from American military bases, space-launch facilities, and military and commercial shipping. Chinese facilities on the island "could also bolster China's use of telecommunications networks to spy on U.S. citizens," said Leland Lazarus, an expert on China-Latin America relations at Florida International University... Authors of the CSIS report, after analyzing years' worth of satellite imagery, found that Cuba has significantly upgraded and expanded its electronic spying facilities in recent years and pinpointed four sites — at Bejucal, El Salao, Wajay and Calabazar... "These are active locations with an evolving mission set," said Matthew Funaiole, a senior follow at CSIS and the report's chief author.
The CSIS web site shows some of the satellite images. "Pinpointing the specific targets of these assets is nearly impossible," they add — but since Cuba has no space program, "the types of space-tracking capabilities observed are likely intended to monitor the activities of other nations (like the United States) with a presence in orbit." While China's own satellites could also benefit from a North America-based groundstation for communications, the Cuban facilities "would also provide the ability to monitor radio traffic and potentially intercept data delivered by U.S. satellites as they pass over highly sensitive military sites across the southern United States."

The think tank points out that one possibly-installed system would be within range to monitor rocket launches from Cape Canaveral and NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "Studying these launches — particularly those of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy reusable first-stage booster rocket systems — is likely of keen interest to China as it attempts to catch up to U.S. leadership in space launch technology."

An artificial intelligence candidate is on the ballot for the United Kingdom's general election next month. From a report: "AI Steve," represented by Sussex businessman Steve Endacott, will appear on the ballot alongside non-AI candidates running to represent constituents in the Brighton Pavilion area of Brighton and Hove, a city on England's southern coast. "AI Steve is the AI co-pilot," Endacott said in an interview. "I'm the real politician going into Parliament, but I'm controlled by my co-pilot." Endacott is the chairman of Neural Voice, a company that creates personalized voice assistants for businesses in the form of an AI avatar. Neural Voice's technology is behind AI Steve, one of the seven characters the company created to showcase its technology.

He said the idea is to use AI to create a politician who is always around to talk with constituents and who can take their views into consideration. People can ask AI Steve questions or share their opinions on Endacott's policies on its website, during which a large language model will give answers in voice and text based on a database of information about his party's policies. If he doesn't have a policy for a particular issue raised, the AI will conduct some internet research before engaging the voter and pushing them to suggest a policy.

Last week America's energy secretary cheered the startup of a fourth nuclear reactor at a Georgia power plant, calling it "the largest producer of clean energy, and the largest producer of electricity in the United States" after a third reactor was started up there in December.

From the U.S. Energy Department's transcript of the speech: Each year, Units 3 and 4 are going to produce enough clean power to power 1 million homes and businesses, enough energy to power roughly 1 in 4 homes in Georgia. Preventing 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution annually. That, by the way, is like planting more than 165 million trees every year!

And that's not to mention the historic investments that [electric utility] Southern has made on the safety front, to ensure this facility meets — and exceeds — the highest operating standards in the world....

To reach our goal of net zero by 2050, we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country. That means we've got to add 200 more gigawatts by 2050. Okay, two down, 198 to go! In building [Unit] 4, we've solved our greatest design challenges. We've stood up entire supply chains.... And so it's time to cash in on our investments by building more. More of these facilities. The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office stands ready to help, with hundreds of billions of dollars in what we call Title 17 loans... Since the President signed the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, companies across the nation have announced 29 new or expanded nuclear facilities — across 16 states — representing about 1,600 potential new jobs. And the majority of those projects will expand the domestic uranium production and fuel fabrication, strengthening these critical supply chains...

Bottom line is, in short, we are determined to build a world-class nuclear industry in the United States, and we're putting our money where our mouth is.
America's Energy Secretary told the Washington Post that "Whether it happens through small modular reactors, or AP1000s, or maybe another design out there worthy of consideration, we want to see nuclear built." The Post notes the Energy department gave a $1.5 billion loan to restart a Michigan power plant which was decommissioned in 2022. "It would mark the first time a shuttered U.S. nuclear plant has been reactivated."

"But in this country with 54 nuclear plants across 28 states, restarting existing reactors and delaying their closure is a lot less complicated than building new ones." When the final [Georgia] reactor went online at the end of April, the expansion was seven years behind schedule and nearly $20 billion over budget. It ultimately cost more than twice as much as promised, with ratepayers footing much of the bill through surcharges and rate hikes...

Administration officials say the country has no choice but to make nuclear power a workable option again. The country is fast running short on electricity, demand for power is surging amid a boom in construction of data centers and manufacturing plants, and a neglected power grid is struggling to accommodate enough new wind and solar power to meet the nation's needs...

As the administration frames the narrative of the plant as one of perseverance and innovation that clears a path for restoring U.S. nuclear energy dominance, even some longtime boosters of the industry question whether this country will ever again have a vibrant nuclear energy sector. "It is hard for me to envision state energy regulators signing off on another one of these, given how badly the last ones went," said Matt Bowen, a nuclear scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who was an adviser on nuclear energy issues in the Obama administration.
The article notes there are 19 AP1000 reactors (the design used at the Georgia plant) in development around the world. "None of them are being built in the United States."

Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC announced plans to build a second chip factory in Japan by the end of 2027, bringing total investment in its Japan venture to more than $20 billion. "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co announced plans in 2021 to build a $7 billion chip plant in Kumamoto in southern Japan's Kyushu," notes Reuters. From the report: In a statement, TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, said its majority-owned unit Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing in Kumamoto would build a second fabrication plant, or fab, in response to rising customer demand. The second fab will begin construction by the end of this year and with both factories the site is expected to have total monthly capacity of more than 100,000 12-inch wafers to be used for automotive, industrial, consumer and high performance computing-related applications, TSMC said. The capacity plan may be further adjusted based upon customer demand, it added.

TSMC's expansion in Kyushu is central to the Japanese government's efforts to rebuild the country's position as a leading chip manufacturing centre and ensure the stable supply of chips amid trade tensions between the United States and China. The decision to build a second fab is a vote of confidence by TSMC in Japan where construction of the first fab has run smoothly and which, Reuters has reported, it sees as a source of diligent workers with a government that is easy to deal with.

Last month was the planet's warmest June since global temperature record-keeping began in 1850, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its monthly climate update on Thursday. From a report: The agency also predicts unusually hot temperatures will occur in most of the United States, almost everywhere except the northern Great Plains, during August. The first two weeks of July were also likely the Earth's warmest on human record, for any time of year, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Many daily temperature records were set in June across the Southern United States, particularly in Texas and Louisiana. Temperatures in Laredo, Texas, reached 100 degrees on more than 20 days in June. Austin, El Paso and San Antonio reached triple digits on more than 10 days each. The heat index, which also accounts for humidity, was well past 100 much of the time in all of these cities. Extreme heat can be dangerous for anyone's body, but older people and outdoor workers are at particular risk. Summer heat waves in Europe last year may have killed 61,000 people across the continent, according to a recent study. This year's heat and humidity have been devastating in northern Mexico, where more than 100 people have died of heat-related causes, according to reports from the federal health ministry.